I hate being sick

Yup, I once again succumbed to the little buggies and spent about a week with a nasty head cold. It's not the sickest I've ever been, but it sure wasn't fun. Oh well, it's over now.

In the meantime, I did have my meeting with the podiatrist. Gotta love a lady named Eureka! Of her own volition, she actually suggested a handful of new stretching exercises as a first step. Yeah. She said if they hadn't made at least some improvement in a month or so, then orthotics would be the next step. However, even after a couple of days, I'm cautiously optimistic that the stretches will make a difference. In her opinion, my biggest problem is that my arches are high and the left one is starting to drop a bit. Apparently, there's nothing to do to stop the drop, but always wearing a good arch support and keeping the whole structure strong and supple should help. I'm putting off the orthotic as long as I possibly can! I also asked about the wart that won't die on my foot - it's been there for about 20 years and has survived several episodes of acid, freezing, etc. She put some ground beetle extract on it, which at least has the virtue of being interesting. We'll see how it works...

I also had some highly surreal and frustrating conversations over the weekend, in what seemed like a straightforward attempt to get mice for Cleo. I went into Petcetera, where I'd already bought several and asked for a hopper.
Clerk: A what?
Me: A hopper. A small mouse? Your tag says manager, but are you brain damaged?
Clerk: Is to feed to another animal?
Me: Yes. Do people keep pet mice? Why? Or maybe he thinks it's for me to eat?
Clerk: It's against our policy to sell animals to feed to other animals.
Me: What? I've bought several here before, recently.
Clerk: Well, they were selling them against policy.
Me: ???!??!?!?!
After several trips and calls around, I finally found a place downtown that has live feeder mice. A nice big room full of rodents of all sizes, meant for nothing but eating. The guy behind me was buying two rabbits for his snake, so my two little hoppers were nothing. And now Cleo is sleeping off her meal. Phew!

The great dog hunt continues as well. I had emailed the breeder in France, asking if she'd put us in contact with folks in Canada who have her puppies, but so far no response. It seems like a reasonable request to us, so we're investigating other European breeders. The biggest hang-up is websites that aren't in English. (And I've developed a new pet peeve - if you have a link that says "English version" it should probably work.) If you know of any BRT breeders who don't dock the dog's tails - please let me know!